NeuroPace, Inc. (NASDAQ:NPCE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rebecca Kuhn: Sure. Thanks, Lilly. We’re providing guidance for the year. We’re not going to provide guidance for the quarters. But as you mentioned, we have seen some seasonality in our business in the past, in particular, over the summer months as people take vacations, I think that’s pretty common. We have kind of interesting dynamics in the fourth quarter where, in addition to holidays and everybody experiences. We also have our major medical meeting, the AES annual meeting that takes people out of physicians away from their offices for a number of days, a nice long weekend. From our perspective, of course, we spend – we have expenses associated with our attendance there. But – so I think that gives you some sense of seasonal trends. And at this point, no reason related things that they are different from the prior year.

Joel Becker: Yes. I’d support all of that. Actually, the only thing I might add there would be a little bit of commentary around patient dynamic seasonality. A lot of times, when we talk seasonality, we’ve got a number of different factors that can come into play there. You can have clinician seasonality you can have kind of health plan and insurance seasonality as well as then you can have kind of patient dynamics of seasonality. We have not traditionally really seen kind of a health plan dynamic and/or a patient kind of beta around seasonality. Most of these patients have been under evaluation and been on their journey of epilepsy therapy for a number of years. And so kind of a monthly variation one way or the other, hasn’t been something that at least traditionally we’ve seen.

As Rebecca said, the seasonality that she called out there tends to be mostly clinician-based seasonality with some dynamics, of course, that you traditionally see around people having surgery around the holidays and those kinds of things. But those tend to be pretty consistent year-to-year as well. So that’s maybe just a little additional color around some seasonality. Hopefully, that helps.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thank you. And then just another follow-up on guidance. Is there any color you can share on what’s really driving the growth in 2024, is it new center adds from Project CARE, growing utilization, ASP, some mix of those dynamics. So how would you break that down?

Joel Becker: That’s a great question. And we considered all of that as we put the guide together. We do anticipate both RNS as well as DIXI growth to really drive the growth in the business in 2024. And while it is early with regard to Project CARE, and we’re not calling out specific units and implants and growth associated with care. I would say that we’re just getting started here with the initiation of activities at the beginning of 2024, and we do expect that as we move through the year, we would see those activities expand in scope as well as potential impact as we move through 2024. If there’s anything else there, Ashley, operator, next question.

Operator: Your next question comes from Michael Polark from Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Michael Polark: Good evening. Thank you. One topic, multiparter. This pharma collaboration, I’m interested in learning a bit more. I think, three sub-questions. One, what’s the revenue from this considered in 2024 guidance? Two, are there more things like this out there to do? Or is this kind of a one-off that seems interesting. I suspect where there’s one, there’s multiple. What does that longer-term opportunity look like? And then three, I guess, another financial part – do you consider this pretty high-margin revenue. I would think so. It sounds like kind of a fee-for-service, and I suspect you’re also getting paid for the implant. So just curious the financial profile of this type of revenue. That’s it for me. Thank you so much.

Joel Becker: Thank you, Mike. Great question. We considered really all the different pieces in the business as we thought about guidance for 2024 including report. And when we think about the opportunities that are out there, we do think that, so we’re excited about this. I’m sure we’ll learn a lot here in the collaboration with them. We’re really pleased with how that has gone and how that is going. But we think that it really highlights a key part of the RNS system, which we take every chance we can to talk about. And I think sometimes doesn’t get quite the billing that it should, from a differentiation perspective is we are uniquely able to monitor record and then analyze data, brain activity and increasingly, our ability to analyze that information we feel like has the potential to provide insights, both for our core business as well as in other areas here potentially like report.

So we do think that we have a fundamental point of differentiation here in capability in that monitoring, reporting and analyzing of data that really can open up a number of different opportunities for us here, whether that’s increased insights and efficiency in our core RNS business or other ways that we can leverage it outside of the RNS business that – that have a potential to be interesting and important to us. We think that’s a fundamental point of differentiation. With regard to margin Rebecca, do you want to chime in there?

Rebecca Kuhn: Sure. Absolutely. So Mike, as you mentioned, we derive essentially service revenue from the agreement. As we’ve shared, we expect that it will be approximately $3.7 million over the course of the agreement, which started in the fourth quarter of 2023 and is expected to continue through 2025. The patients that enroll in the study are patients that already have the RNS system implanted. So our revenue is really the service revenue that we derive from that arrangement. And so it’s data from the implanted devices, analysis and support by our team here. There is some incremental expense, yes, associated with it. But I think that kind of gives you a general flavor for the economics of the deal.

Michael Polark: Thank you.

Joel Becker: Thanks, Mike.

Operator: Your next question comes from Drew Ranieri from Morgan Stanley. Your line now open.